Benjamin prepares his people for their new name with a brilliantly multi-layered description of the change that has come over them, a description which evokes multiple themes simultaneously. The first and most obvious is relationship of the son/daughter to the father. In all societies, this relationship is charged with expectations of mutual obligations. Thus, Benjamin simultaneously creates a loving relationship and invokes the obligations it presents.
Defining the Messiah as the father in this transformation comes from the nature of the relationship of humans to the divine. Yahweh-Messiah is father to Benjamin’s people because he is the instrument of their new birth. This special definition does not confuse the relationship of Yahweh to his Father (the Most High God) in the heavens. (See “Excursus: The Nephite Understanding of God,” following 1 Nephi 11.)
Benjamin uses birth as a metaphor of transformation, suggesting that his people may have understood the life of the spirit as separate from the body with the spirit becoming the physical body at birth. That transformation from spiritual to physical is now reversed, with a spiritual birth occurring even as the individual remains in the physical world. His connection of transformation with children recalls his earlier evocation of children as the righteous. The “old men” and others whom he cautioned for their affiliation with past contentions are now transformed into children. They are no longer rebels but fully embraced by the Messiah’s atoning sacrifice.